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Wake Up Wal-MartWhat is the "Wake-Up Wal-Mart" campaign all about?
Well, there are two visions for America: Wal-Mart's America, where profits come before people, and my vision, where people come first.

In Wal-Mart's America, workers are paid poverty level wages even when they work full-time.
In my America, workers are paid a living wage with proper health and retirement benefits.

In Wal-Mart's America, wealthy companies shift their health care costs onto taxpayers like you and your families.
In my America, corporations live up to their responsibility and provide their employees with adequate and affordable health care coverage.

In Wal-Mart's America, suppliers are forced to make their goods cheaper even if it means shipping U.S. jobs overseas.
In my America, we value U.S. jobs and companies that buy and sell "Made in America."

In Wal-Mart's America, women are paid less than men.
In my America, women and men are treated equally - fair pay for everyone.

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OBAMA/BIDEN: Wrong on the bailout.
OBAMA/BIDEN: Wrong on FISA.
OBAMA/BIDEN: Wrong on the endless "War on Terror".
OBAMA/BIDEN: Wrong on the endless "War on Drugs".
OBAMA/BIDEN: Wrong on continuing the Bush tax cuts.
OBAMA/BIDEN: Wrong on impeachment.
OBAMA/BIDEN: Wrong to not prosecute the Bush torture team.
OBAMA/BIDEN: Wrong to appoint the criminals who caused the financial crisis to positions responsible for fixing it.

See what blind hope will get you? I voted for Cynthia McKinney.

I pledge allegiance to NO FLAG. Certainly not one that stands for corruption, injustice, murder, genocide, torture, invasion of privacy and unlawful search and seizure. With liberty and the free pursuit of happiness for corporations and the criminals who run them. Bankruptcy, hunger and homelessness for the rest.

America: land of the deceived, home of the afraid. Fear level: ORANGE

Brought to you by so-called "democracy" from what was once described as "the greatest country in the world". Today we are the greatest polluters of the world, proclaimed proudly by George W. Bush at the G8 Summit on 7/10/08. By my count, we lost the moral high-ground at least as early as 1962. In that year, the United States began pouring Monsanto products over the globe, killing crops and foliage, poisoning habitats, and causing pain, suffering and birth defects yet today. Since then, we have also insisted on using depleted uranium munitions which have created environmental disasters that we take no resposibility for cleaning up. Chemical and radiation poisoning: the coward's gifts of death. And ones that keep on giving for generations to come.

I wish not to live in a failed fascist empire that roams the world MURDERING and TORTURING for oil.

GOD DAMN the Terrorist States of America!

"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." — Henry David Thoreau

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"To accept passively an unjust system is to cooperate with that system; thereby the oppressed become as evil as the oppressor." — Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Curtailment of free speech is rationalized on grounds that a more compelling American tradition forbids criticism of the government when the nation is at war...Nothing can be more destructive of our fundamental democratic traditions than the vicious effort to silence dissenters."
— Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Everyone knows that this country is being run by a criminal syndicate that has rigged elections, hidden its knowledge of the 9-11 attacks, lied the country into war, plotted to out an important CIA undercover operative and then obstruct a criminal investigation into that treasonous act, subverted most of the articles of the Bill of Rights, emasculated the Congress and the Courts (which it has also shamelessly packed with shameless hacks), betrayed veterans, surrendered a major American metropolis to the devastation of a hurricane, plotted to enable the declaring of martial law, tortured kidnapped and killed people in violation of international law and obstructed efforts to deal with the unprecedented crisis of global warming for an unconscionable seven years." — Dave Lindorff, award-winning journalist, former New York Times contributor, graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, two-time Journalism Fulbright Scholar, and co-author, with Barbara Olshansky, of the book The Case for Impeachment.

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Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Senator Allen's Staff Tackles BloggerStaff members of GOP Senator George Allen of Virginia appear in a video to have physically accosted a blogger who asked questions at a rally in Virginia. The blogger, Mike Stark, says he will press charges. see video

By Jason Leopoldt r u t h o u t Report

Tuesday 31 October 2006

A physical confrontation caught on tape broke out Tuesday morning in the lobby of the Omni Hotel in downtown Charlottesville between aides to Republican Senator George Allen and a person identified as Mike Stark, a man who has spent the past several months following Allen around the campaign trail and peppering him with some hard-hitting questions.

Stark, an ex-marine who is currently a law student at the University of Virginia, showed up at a campaign rally for Allen and was tackled and put into a choke hold by aides to the Republican senator for allegedly asking Allen what his staff claims were multiple inappropriate questions about Allen's wife.

In an interview Tuesday afternoon with a reporter for the website TalkingPoints Memo, Stark said he was "within four feet" of Allen when he started firing off questions.

"My question was, 'Senator Allen, Democrats are making this election about accountability. You can shut them up by telling us what was in your police records from the seventies,'" Stark told TalkingPoints Memo. "He kind of muttered to himself, kind of, 'I'm not gonna go there.' Immediately his campaign staff started pushing me around, shoving me around, trying to form a human wall between me and him. I continued to pace him out into the lobby. My next question was, 'Is it true that you spit on your wife?'"

With Tuesday's Allen fracas, Stark has officially ventured into the type of gumshoe reporting where mainstream reporters fear to tread. He's no stranger to Allen's campaign staff.

According to reports on several progressive blogs, Stark launched a website, callingallwingnuts.com, in 2002 to provide the public with an inside view of the horrors of war - something pro-war pundits, Stark said, were leaving out of their coverage. That's when he started to direct his questions squarely at the media he believed was distorting the message.

"I started calling local radio talk shows whenever I had the time and sharing what I knew about the Iraq situation," Stark told a reporter for the website MyDD.com earlier this month. "I wanted people to be careful - I wanted to remind them that they shouldn't believe everything they heard."

But Stark doesn't limit his ire for those solely on the right. There have been a few notable Democrats who have been caught off-guard by Stark's tough questions.

"I love asking politicians questions that they don't want to answer," Stark told MyDD.com "And that includes people on my side. As we've found, a lot of people are prone to being lazy or safe. If they're shocked by a question from someone on their side that they don't want to face, it reminds them that they're going to have to be accountable, that they have to work to keep our support." But Stark is surprised people think that what he's doing takes guts. "I'm thinking, how have I exposed myself to any risk here? There's nothing anyone can do to harm me. I'm just willing to confront people who are doing something I think is wrong. Of course, I know a lot of people are afraid of confrontation. But in this case, they've got it backwards ... because it's the politicians who should be afraid of us. They're the people who, if they're not careful, will make complete asses out of themselves in their effort to keep their power."

Over the summer, the part-time blogger showed up at another event for the embattled senator and asked him whether he has ever used the N-word. Allen, the incumbent from Virginia, came under fire in mid-August for twice using the racial slur "macaca" to refer to S.R.Sidarth, who was filming a campaign event as a "tracker" for Democratic challenger Jim Webb's campaign. Sidarth was born and raised in Fairfax County, Virginia, but is of Indian ancestry.

Stark, in his late-30s, pressed Allen at an event held at the Holiday Inn in Staunton, demanding that the senator respond to questions about the reasons he kept a Confederate Flag and a noose in his district office.

Allen never answered the questions, but Stark was asked to leave the event by Allen aide David Nepp. It's unclear whether Nepp was one of the men caught on tape assaulting Stark. Neither Allen, his spokesperson, or Stark were immediately available for comment. Webb, the Democratic challenger, is reportedly slightly ahead of Allen in the polls, according to local Virginian news reports.

Stark's guerilla-like reporting tactics have also roiled some well-known conservative pundits. He's made numerous phone calls to the Bill O'Reilly show in an attempt to get the Fox News talk show host to respond to tough questions about the domestic and foreign policy issues, resulting in several on-air threats from O'Reilly, and he has pushed Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity's buttons as well.

Stark, the father of a 14-month-old girl, admits, however, that being a vocal activist has its drawbacks.

"Every time I make a decision on whether to go to Washington, or attend any political event, I'm taking time away from being with my daughter," he told MyDD.com.

But he said he's driven by a passion to change the political landscape in Washington.

"These are pretty momentous times, and I think the people who are in charge of things right now are pretty close to just plain evil," he told MyDD. "We have a responsibility to our country and each other to get involved."